A torch burns through James Gray’s The Immigrant, but it’s not the one held in stony majesty by the Statue of Liberty, an image that bookends this deeply realized drama.

It’s the unquenchable fire of Marion Cotillard’s character Ewa, a Polish survivor of the Great War who in January 1921 finds herself among the “huddled masses” on New York’s Ellis Island, seeking entry to the American Dream.

She stands in line with her sister Magda (Angela Sarafyan), who struggles to hide a persistent cough from immigrant officials. Even if Darius Khondji’s lens didn’t so magnificently depict the era’s sepia gloom, we can guess the chilly reception — and separation — that awaits.

Thus begins Ewa’s wrenching odyssey, one that advances Cotillard’s status as an actor of tremendous empathy and writer/director Gray’s reputation as an artful observer of ordinary people pushed to extremes.

Gray has found in Cotillard a face and burning intensity that seem of the 1920s, a decade that roared only for the affluent. Her performance was lamentably overlooked for Best Actress honours at Cannes 2013, a prize that ironically went to The Past’s Bérénice Bejo, best known for playing a silent film star in The Artist.

Cotillard is matched with Joaquin Phoenix, now a four-time veteran of Gray’s films, whose character Bruno enters the scene as a smooth fixer of all things but whose psyche and history are considerably rockier.

He bribes Ewa out of immediate deportation and also offers her a bed in his home, but his help comes with a price: he expects her to join his troupe of scantily clad club dancers and also participate in providing “extras” to eager male clients.

To a staunch Catholic girl like Ewa — likely a virgin despite unfounded allegations of her being “a woman of low morals” on the ship voyage over — this is a fate worse than death. She would probably choose death, if not for her determination to find a way to rescue Magda.

The situation is melodrama of the highest order but Gray and co-writer Richard Menello (recently deceased, he also collaborated with Gray on Two Lovers) take pains to avoid histrionics. (So does composer Chris Spelman, whose affecting score uses big operatic flourishes sparingly.)

The story is revealed mainly through character and surroundings, sometimes to the peril of narrative drive. The picture is so steeped in time and place, depicting the wretched plight of immigrants and women in early 20th century New York, it almost forgets to go anywhere.

At times, Khondji’s golden portraiture can make the characters seem encased in amber. But there’s a tremendous payoff for the patient.

Cotillard’s performance is so great, expressing inward pain more through gesture than word, that it would be hard for anyone to match her.

And Phoenix doesn’t quite do so, although his Bruno slowly registers as a man of far more complexity than is first assumed.

The two are significantly more impressive than the film’s third main character, a magician played by Jeremy Renner who is more sketched than fully considered.

He doesn’t show up until the 45-minute mark, and when he does he serves mainly as a catalyst to Bruno’s barely concealed jealousy. It’s the one major flaw that keeps this very good film just this side of greatness.

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